Support for less social people

Tag: blog

There’s surprising amount of resources, and actual classes, worksheets, internet discussion, as long as you identify as having low social skills. A quick overview confirmed that it is helpful in most extreme cases, and gets you up to the mediocre level. The target audience of my blog are those who are trying to take a leap from mediocre to socially successful, whatever that means. From being able to get through all the conversations in the day without embarassing yourself/offending anyone – to actually attracting conversations, being valuable for your peers, being invited everywhere and considered the very best friend.

The way people learn that is by copying their role model. By being around very social people, observing how they treat their friends, and actively wanting to be like them. At first a person may embarass oneself in this imitation, but it’s all typically happening even before high school, so embarassments, though painful, are not the end of the world.

Now, the problem is that people with good social skills that you may learn from tend to use them on their friends, people they care about. And then they just autopilot around everybody else. And if you don’t already have good social skills, chances are they will autopilot around you. So even if you spend a lot of time with them, you may not see much of what you can imitate. To grow, you need to actually talk your way into the company of friends, where everybody cares about each other and has better social skills than you. Typically those people won’t care about you, unless they need you for something. But luckily that’s not the goal here. Goal is to be around them and observe how they treat their friends, not to be their friend.

Ideally, every person who’s in tech careers with rare chances to learn social skills should have an opportunity to surround oneself with more social people and get up-to-date. Unfortunately, the opposite happens for me – I spend most of my time with people who are even less social than me. Not that they are bad friends, but it shouldn’t be my job to get them to improve their skills. I should focus on my career – there are tons of less successful in their careers but very social people around our school to help us all.